Wonderland

Games For Change conf looks amazing this year

Check out the speakers this year:

• The first-ever White House Chief Technology Officer: Aneesh Chopra.
• Clay Shirky, Internet expert and author of Here Comes Everybody
• Nick Bilton, Specialist at the New York Times R&D Lab & author of the forthcoming book, I Live In The Future And Here's How It Works
• Katie Salen, Executive Director of NYC's innovative "game school" Quest To Learn
• Dr. James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University
• Micah Sifry, co-founder TechPresident.com and Personal Democracy Forum

.. and the program.

Oh to be in NYC.

3D printed Companion Cube

Sean has a MakerBot, and so he printed a Companion Cube. 

It's a little scruffy, but nothing a coat of paint wouldn't fix. 3D printing, it's the future!

Semacode/QR patch for your clothes

You can get a semacode of whatever your URL is, made up into this patch, for sewing onto clothes. I love this. Love it. What a nerd. But seriously, sod business cards made of paper and inks and plastic boxes.
I love ambient data. I love data-soaked clothing. Don't ask me why.

P8TCH.

(Peightch? Someone can't leetspell, tsk.)

Jesse Schell: "That was unexpected...!"

Jesse Schell. Ex-Imagineer. Games creator. DICE-talker. He speaks as a traditional games industry person, marvelling at the unexpected Facebook, Webkinz, Club Penguin, Wii Fit and other wake-ups that the games industry has experienced this past two... just two... years.

Wii Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

19:20 onwards is very interesting for me: a teacher turning School into a Game. XP points for grades, and you level up through the class. Class attendance and participation are both up. Also the proliferation of points systems: gas points, coffee points, airline points. "Imagine if these were designed," he says, meaning designed by a games designer.

Imagine indeed.

And then he really goes for it. Stick with it till the end.

G4 did a wonderful job of filming DICE, btw. Fantastic that these talks are just generally available.

(Via GigaOM)

iPhone game raises gay/lesbian rights awareness

I love this: simple puzzle games with a far more complex backstory:

The company is pitching the game (App Store link) as Tetris meets Diner Dash, offering 3D arcade puzzles around a virtual car valet business.

However, the two central characters - Ren and Akira - are both gay, with their sexuality central to the storyline as players progress through the game.

"We set out to not only create a game that is an absolute blast to play with incredible visuals and top notch audio, but we also wanted to make a social statement that gays and lesbians should have the same marital rights as heterosexuals," says CEO Andrew Littlefield.

Heavy Rain: shower scene

I LOVE it, a naked bum in a videogame, and it's not a lady's.

That's it, games are officially art now.

The vid's rated as "mature content" for some reason. People are scared of buttocks now? Anyway. Maybe don't watch it at work if you don't want eyebrows raised, although you can shout, LOOK! it's a VIDEOGAME! and watch all your colleagues come running to gawp.

(via GayGamer)

The Indie <3 Bundle

6 of the best indie games ever made, for the lowly sum of $20 - although you have until Friday to get them at that price.

 

Put together by the very people who made 'em:

Cheers,
Amanita Design, Broken Rules, Cipher Prime, Citeremis,

Hemisphere Games and Omni Systems

(Via GayGamer.)

Susan Wu and pals' City of Eternals

Susan Wu used to be a VC - she invested in Metaplace, and Twitter, amongst others - but is also so very well known for always being the virtual goods / virtual currency specialist at game conferences. Where there's a panel on vg/vc, she would be there, being a fount of knowledge.

Now she's a CEO, and her new game, City of Eternals, seems to be taking on the Runescape crowd with a more female slant. It's web-based, got Facebook, it's got vampires, and it's got microtransactions. It's also got Wagner James Au creating the quests, and some ex-Sonyites building the code.

It's a fairly-agreed-upon figure that $1 to $1.50 is the Average Revenue Per User in most microtransaction-centric (aka freemium) games and virtual worlds, but City of Eternals is pulling in $16.50 ARPU.

UPDATE: hoist on my own fast skimming: while $1.50 is sensible ARPU, City of Eternals is pulling in $16.50 ARPPU: average revenue per PAYING user. GamesBeat has the full story. Raph's ARPU vs ARPPU is worth reading too, for this.

So okay, it's very early days, the game's in beta and is freshly live to the mass player base rather than the more select (and by nature more dedicated) alpha crowd, so this number will settle at something lower once the userbase is up in the 100ks or 1000ks. Clearly all that virtual goods research paid off ;-) Can't wait to see what the ARPU settles at.

Meanwhile:

 

I dithered here for a whole five minutes. I eventually plumped for [4], but hooee, [3] and [5] and even [1] had my hand hovering. I don't know what my choice means yet...

State of Independence: Self-Publishing conf in April

GameHorizon and Game Republic have announced an international self-publishing conference to be held in York, UK on April 8.

Key areas to be covered at the one-day event are:

• Different routes to market and new business models.
• Funding your game – including access to investors.
• Learning from current success stories.
• Marketing your own games – including PR, viral marketing and customer service.
• Networking with other games industry professionals.

More details, including pricing, can be found here.

That looks like it could be pretty useful, although it's priced at £150 which is far too high IMHO considering half the needful audience are likely self-funding, bedroom-coding, not-rich-yet types. Matt Locke just put together The Story for £25, in London too, so it absolutely can be done...

Crochet Bioshock Big Daddy

I am so impressed with this!

The creator published her pattern too, which frankly reads like machine code.

(via technobob)